What my dad the psychoanalyst taught me about AI
The gap between processing words and understanding them.
My dad was a psychoanalyst. He spent his career learning to hear what people were actually saying — not just the words, but what lived underneath them.
He told me a story once that stuck with me.
The woman in the waiting room
He walked out of his office one afternoon and found a woman sitting there — not one of his patients. He asked if he could help. She said, “I think I’m supposed to be here.”
Something in how she said it — her affect, her manner — told him immediately she was in distress. He had a free hour. He invited her in.
A few questions later, she mentioned she was 33 years old. She was overwhelmed with anxiety. She felt persecuted. She said she felt like she was being crucified.
My dad made a quiet connection: 33 years old. Persecuted. Crucified. He said, “Are you Jesus Christ?”
She said yes.
He hadn’t followed a script. No checklist would have gotten him there. He just listened — closely, in real time — and connected three details that no written procedure would have linked together.
(The story has a memorable coda: she later showed up at our house and climbed on the roof. But that’s another day.)
Why I keep coming back to this story
I use AI tools every day now — and I find them genuinely useful. Claude handles structured tasks well. Ask it to summarize a document, draft a letter, or prep you for a client meeting, and it delivers.
But AI is literal. It processes what’s in front of it. It doesn’t notice what’s off. It can’t sense that someone said crucified and quietly connect that to the other two details.
There’s a name for what my dad had that AI doesn’t: tacit knowledge. The philosopher Michael Polanyi defined it simply: “We can know more than we can tell.” It’s expertise that lives in intuition and pattern recognition — the kind that resists being turned into a prompt.
What this means for you
A lot of what experienced lawyers do is tacit knowledge in action.
You’re not just processing what a client or opposing counsel says. You’re reading hesitation. You’re noticing when the story doesn’t quite add up. You’re clocking the detail mentioned once that doesn’t get mentioned again.
AI handles the explicit, structured parts of your work well. But the part that requires real-time judgment and reading between the lines? That still belongs to you.
;-)
Ernie
P.S. In the Inner Circle, we share what’s actually working with AI in law practice — and what isn’t.
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